I owe Red Sox catcher Carlos Narváez an apology. In my preseason write-up of Boston’s backstops, I called him “organizational depth.” I lumped him in with Blake Sabol and Seby Zavala as the uninspiring backup catcher options for the team with the worst projected WAR at the position in the American League. That was in March. Now it’s June, and the rookie is slashing .288/.356/.456 with five home runs and a 126 wRC+ through 47 games. Thanks to strong framing, blocking, and throwing skills, he has earned himself 6 DRS and a +6 FRV. The only catcher who has him beat in both metrics is defensive wizard Patrick Bailey. By WAR, Narváez is one of the top-30 position players in the game. Among catchers, he ranks fifth, and if you only consider WAR accumulated as a catcher, he ranks second. If he keeps this up for a few more weeks, he’ll have a compelling case to be Cal Raleigh’s backup at the All-Star Game this summer.

Regardless what happens from here on out, Narváez has already been far more than just depth for the Red Sox. I was wrong, and I will readily eat crow or humble pie, though I’d really prefer the pie. At the same time, I can’t blame myself too much for overlooking him. After all, it took more than eight years from the day he signed with the Yankees as an international free agent for him to appear as anything more than an honorable mention on one of our organizational top prospect lists. Even then, Eric Longenhagen ranked him 32nd in the Yankees system (35+ FV) entering 2024, with the words “third catcher” closing out his write-up. Meanwhile, Narváez didn’t appear on a Baseball America list until this past offseason, when the publication ranked him 29th in the Red Sox organization. Neither Baseball Prospectus, nor The Athletic mentioned him on their top-20 Red Sox prospects lists this winter.

While I might have been wrong about who Narváez would be, I wasn’t wrong about who he had been when I called him “unknown” and “hardly… a top prospect.” Still, I used his reputation, or really his lack of a reputation, to let myself off the hook from learning more about him. Relying on reputation is often a necessary heuristic technique – if we all had to verify everything for ourselves, we’d never accomplish anything – but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to mistakes. With more than 100 catchers to consider for the Position Power Rankings, I needed to find ways to reduce my workload. So, I glossed over Narváez because he didn’t have enough of a reputation to attract more of my attention. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote a few weeks ago about how Kyle Schwarber deserves to be the first player in baseball history to get not his own bobblehead doll, but rather his own bobble helmet doll, I neglected to mention one thing. Schwarber has been brilliant this season. He’s off to the best start of his entire career. Schwarber is currently running a 164 wRC+, which makes him the eighth-best qualified hitter in baseball. His 19 home runs and 16% walk rate both rank in the top five. That excellent spring is all the more impressive considering that Schwarber is, relatively speaking, something of a slow starter. He owns a career 110 wRC+ in March and April, followed by a 115 mark in May, then a 145 mark in June. This season, he just started out hot and got even hotter. Here’s a table that shows his wOBA in March and April through his entire career:

Schwarber has had plenty of hot streaks like this one before, but never to lead off a season. Moreover, the way he’s doing it is different. With Joey Gallo attempting to reinvent himself as a pitcher, Schwarber stands alone as the game’s foremost practitioner of the Three True Outcomes, but he’s doing his best to abandon one of those outcomes. He’s currently running a 24.4% strikeout rate, which would represent the lowest rate of his career and a drop of more than four percentage points compared to last season. In addition to lowering his strikeout rate, Schwarber is doing more damage than ever when he puts the ball in play. His .499 wOBAcon and .531 xwOBAcon are the best marks of his entire career. Read the rest of this entry »

In early April, Davy Andrews penned an article that ran here at FanGraphs and began with the following: “You may have noticed that this is the Year of the Kick-Change.” My colleague went on to explain the pitch, which by now most people reading this are well familiar with. Our own coverage of the popular offering also includes an interview with Davis Martin and Matt Bowman from last September, and a feature from this spring on Hayden Birdsong, who throws a kick-change, and his teammate Landen Roupp, who does not. The pitch is thrown exclusively (at least to my knowledge) by supinators such as Martin, who explained that spiking his middle finger on a seam allows him to “kick the axis of the ball into that three o’clock axis [and] get that saucer-type spin to get the depth that a guy who could pronate a changeup would get to.”

Thinking about the pitch recently, a question came to mind: What would happen if a natural pronator tried to throw a kick-change?

In search of an answer, I queried three major league pitching coaches, as well as Tread Athletics’ Leif Strom, who in addition to having hands-on knowledge of the kick-change is credited with coining the term. Their responses varied. Moreover, they meandered a bit — but in a good way — as they offered insight into the science of throwing a baseball from a mound.

Here is what they had to say.

The following answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

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Desi Druschel, New York Mets

“There are a couple of ways to look at the kick-change. Most people interpret it as, ‘the spike kicks the axis,’ but I’m not necessarily convinced. Another thought is that [the middle finger] is just out of the way, and the ring finger kind of swipes below it. You’re kicking the axis, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s always kicking it how people might think. That would be on the one where there is more supination. Read the rest of this entry »

About six weeks ago, Eric Longenhagen published his Dodgers Top Prospects list. It ran 51 players deep, and was headlined by some of the trendiest names in prospect circles: Roki Sasaki, Dalton Rushing, Zyhir Hope. Down at no. 24, headlining the 40 FV group, was a blurb that started with the following phrase: “Low Leverage Ben.”

Ben Casparius is a bulk reliever. He is now what the fifth starter in a four-man rotation was 40 years ago. Most baseball fans know him as the rookie who got called on to make a spot start in Game 4 of last year’s World Series. He’s the guy you call on when Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler have all taken their turns in the rotation, and Clayton Kershaw is hurt. And so is Tyler Glasnow. And Tony Gonsolin. And Bobby Miller. And River Ryan. And Gavin Stone. And Emmet Sheehan. And (ironically) Kyle Hurt. And Shohei Ohtani, or half of him, anyway.

I guess when you’re in the double digits on the Dodgers’ starting pitcher pecking order, getting “Low Leverage” as a nickname is an occupational hazard. But I don’t like it. Mostly because it’s one short of the three-beat alliteration that made “Late Night LaMonte” roll off the tongue so felicitously. (My condolences to LaMonte Wade Jr. on his recent DFA.)

But also because it’s not true. Read the rest of this entry »

Any fan, analyst, or baseball executive would be hard-pressed to say that the Rangers pitching staff has failed to do its job in 2025. The rotation has been especially solid, ranking first in baseball in ERA, seventh in FIP, and sixth in WAR. If the bullpen hasn’t been as dominant, they’ve also improved significantly compared to last season, already accumulating almost as many wins above replacement as they did in the entire 2024 season. And yet the Rangers, less than two years removed from soaking each other with champagne to celebrate a World Series championship, sit below .500. A losing season here would be the franchise’s eighth in the last nine years, its worst showing since the move from Washington to Texas. The bats have let the team down, ranking near the bottom of baseball, and what’s worse, the underperforming offense consists mainly of players who the Rangers wanted in their lineup. So is there hope for a turnaround, or will the Rangers need to find new solutions to their run-scoring woes?

First, let’s assess just how lousy the offense has been. Well, ranking 25th in the majors in runs scored is their sunniest number. The Rangers rank 28th in on-base percentage, 27th in slugging percentage, and 28th in wRC+ at 80. The latter number outpaces only the Pirates and Rockies, two teams you don’t especially want to model your ballclub after. While the team has played solid defense, the abundance of leather hasn’t come close to making up for the shortage of wood, leaving the Rangers’ position players 25th in the league in WAR. What little offense there has been has come in very short bursts:

Read the rest of this entry »

Royce Lewis almost had another grand slam. With the bases loaded in the top of the seventh inning in Sacramento on Tuesday night, A’s righty Tyler Ferguson left a sweeper on the outside edge of the strike zone, and the Twins third baseman — who two years ago hit four grand slams in an 18-day span — didn’t miss it. A’s center fielder Denzel Clarke couldn’t reach the 100-mph, 392-foot drive into the left-center gap in time. Instead, both Clarke and the ball caromed off the wall in quick succession, the sphere a couple feet short of leaving the yard but still good enough to produce a two-run double that expanded the Minnesota lead to 8-3 and finally broke Lewis’ latest string of futility after 32 at-bats.

“It was good to see the ball hit the grass or the dirt [or] the wall,” Lewis said. “Just anything other than a glove.”

Lewis, who turns 26 on Thursday, has become all too familiar with such grueling stretches. This is his third time since the start of last September that he’s endured a hitless streak of at least 22 at-bats, though unlike the first two, he was at least hitting the ball reasonably hard during this one: Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Houck has had a tough start to his 2024 season. Prior to going on the injured list in mid-May with an elbow strain, the 28-year-old Boston Red Sox right-hander logged an 8.04 ERA over nine mostly tumultuous outings. His track record shows that he is far better. Houck’s year-to-year consistency has been a bit on the uneven side, but he nonetheless possesses a 3.97 ERA and a 3.71 FIP since reaching the big leagues in 2020. Last season was his best. A mainstay in Boston’s rotation, he made a career-high 30 starts and put up 3.9 WAR and a 3.12 ERA.

His future role was in question when our 2019 Red Sox Top Prospects list was published in January of that year. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel explained at the time, some scouts preferred the 24th overall pick in the 2017 draft as a starter, while others saw him as a reliever. Our prospect analyst duo ranked the University of Missouri product fifth in the system and assigned him a 40+ FV.

What did Houck’s 2019 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric and Kiley wrote and asked Houck to respond to it.
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“Houck was a projection prep arm from Illinois whose price was just high enough to get him to Missouri.”

“I committed to Mizzou fairly early in the process,” explained Houck, who was born in St. Louis and attended high school in nearby Collinsville, Illinois. “I really wasn’t a big prospect. I was only throwing 84-87 [mph] at the time. So that was probably a fair judgement. I definitely grew up and got stronger. I filled out my frame a little bit. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Hannah Keyser, of the excellent Bandwagon newsletter, threw down the gauntlet on Bluesky. She posted a screenshot from MLB Network’s daily research packet and wrote, “I challenge the researches at MLBN who put out the daily stat packet to find a split that makes the Rockies look good.” The screenshot featured a single line of text:

The daily research packet is exactly what it sounds like, a multi-page document that contains tons of research on the day’s slate of games, broken down into bit-sized pieces of interesting information. A team of researchers assembles it each morning, then distributes it far and wide across the baseball media ecosphere. Although you’ve probably never seen this document, it has unquestionably informed your experience as a fan. Each broadcast team has its own researchers, of course, but if you’re watching a game and you hear the announcer casually mention that Mickey Moniak is batting .333 with a .476 slugging percentage when he represents the go-ahead run, you can feel pretty confident that they read that fun fact verbatim from the packet. Read the rest of this entry »

If, like me, you’re a weird baseball transactions sicko, you probably first heard of Luis Torrens at the tail end of 2016. That’s when the Padres, in the midst of an A.J. Preller-led teardown, shocked baseball by taking three low-minors players in the Rule 5 Draft and putting them all on the major league roster for 2017. It was a bold, unheard of tactic. The three players – Allen Córdoba, Miguel Díaz, and Torrens – were clearly not ready for the majors. Torrens, the most advanced of the trio, was 21 and had around 200 plate appearances of full-season minor league ball under his belt, and he was still learning his new position of catcher.

That trio was famously overmatched in 2017. Torrens racked up -1.3 WAR in 139 plate appearances, Córdoba -1.0 WAR in 227 of his own, and Diaz -0.7 WAR in 41 2/3 innings pitched. The whole experiment was an embarrassment for the league, and no one has since tried similar chicanery. The Padres sent them down after the season, as soon as they were eligible to do so without having to return them to their previous organizations; Torrens and Córdoba spent all of 2018 in the minors, and both struggled in A Ball. Torrens did finally return to the majors as a backup in 2019, but Preller flipped him to Seattle a year later and he slid into journeyman status. From 2019 through 2023, he bounced around, rarely getting consistent playing time, ending up with 668 plate appearances, a 92 wRC+, and -0.4 WAR thanks to iffy defense.

I’ve used what San Diego did in this particular Rule 5 Draft as a cautionary tale when people ask me about the risks of rushing low-level minor leaguers to The Show. I firmly believe that this Rule 5 manipulation interrupted each of their career arcs – they just weren’t ready for the challenge, which is hardly unexpected given where they’d been playing. Each was a promising prospect, but in the six years after the Padres selected them, the amount of time you’d expect them to be under team control, they combined for -3.2 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Diego Padres. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »